It’s a bit like a slugger crediting Barry Bonds for help with his homerun swing. An anesthesiology journal has retracted a 2018 paper that cited three retracted papers by Yoshitaka Fujii, the record-holder for most retractions by a single author.
It is interesting that some are calling for full cancellation. While we generally support the work of Retraction Watch, in this case we think what’s proposed here is a bad idea. It is better to have the work marked for what it is, flawed and with a detailed retraction notice, in the public record so others may learn.
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The article in question, “Priming with different doses of Metoclopramide preceded by tourniquet alleviates propofol induced pain: a comparative study with lidocaine,” appeared in 2018 in the Egyptian Journal of Anaesthesia (EJA). Three of the citations were of papers by Fujii, although the article had other failings, too.
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Those citations caught the attention of a reader, who wrote letter to the editor in 2019. The author duly noted that one of the Fujii references — which we’ll call zombie papers — had been retracted in 2013, while the other two had been retracted in 2018, but after the authors had submitted their manuscript to the EJA.
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